Bugs, Bones and Feathers

In less sure hands, New York City's Museum of Arts and Design's Dead or Alive, an exhibition of thirty-seven international artists, whose work is composed of feathers, bones, egg shells, insects, fur, antlers, dried and rotting plants - with a few stuffed birds and animals thrown in - would be a creepy, crawly experience, one that could conceivably have people running towards the exits. Not so with this exhibition. Dead and Alive, conceived by chief curator David Revere McFadden and his team examines beauty in the extreme: living proof, so to speak, that a sow's ear can, indeed, be turned into a silk purse. It is also, despite outwardly appearances, an intellectual adventure, one that encourages serious thought on ecology, beauty, violence to humans and animals, and most noticeably our own mortality. In its use of idiosyncratic materials, and the attention paid to the oddities of natural history, Dead or Alive reminds one of a sixteenth century Cabinet of Wonders, for each highly distinctive work of art becomes a microcosm of the world. From videos, to sculptures, to highly crafted installations, it is a virtual sideshow of organic matter made art, some functional, some not. An obsession with numbers seems sometimes to be the artist's metier. In Eight Thousand Miles of Home (2010), Thailand artist Angus Hutcheson weaves some 12,000 silk worm cocoons into a beautiful overhead cloud-like light fixture. Moon (2006), Tracey Heneberger's sculptural wall hanging is composed of over a thousand shellacked sardines intricately arranged in a circle.